Scholarships for minority students to go online

Government to launch a new system to ensure better transparency in the implementation of plans to uplift students from minority communities

The government has decided to launch an 'Online Scholarship Management System' next week to ensure greater transparency in the implementation of its plans for upliftment of students from minority communities.

The Minority Affairs Ministry headed by Salman Khurshid will also start video conferencing with the states for better implementation of the Multi-sectoral Development Plans (MsDP) in the 90 minority concentrated districts of the country, which lag behind in the national parameters of development. The Online Scholarship Management System (OSMS) will deal with scholarship schemes for pre-matric and post-matric students from minority communities aspiring for technical and professional education.

An official launch is expected on April 14-15, ministry sources said.

The ministry has exceeded its targets in both pre-matric and post-matric schemes, they said. In the pre-matric scholarship scheme, more than 37 lakh scholarships were provided against the target of 20 lakh scholarships last year.

The financial target for the scheme, which was pegged at Rs 450 crore, was increased to Rs 600 crore this year. In the post-matric scholarship scheme, the ministry had a target of providing 4 lakh scholarships, but distributed scholarships to over 5 lakh students.

The allocation was also increased to Rs 450 crore from last year's Rs 250 crore. The sources said the plan for video conferencing aims to ensure effective monitoring of the implementation of MsDP in districts with concentration of people from minorities as a number of states have been eager to inform the Centre of the actual position of the schemes in such areas.

Video-conferencing will ensure that the Central government can more frequently and directly interact with state authorities and achieve better results, they added. Ministry officials had held a detailed meeting with minority secretaries of various states and union territories here a few days back, informing them about the need for better implementation of MsDP.

The meeting had taken an overview of financial performance of MsDP with a focus on financial year 2011-12, which is the last year for implementation of MsDP in the Twelfth Plan. In the meeting the ministry had also asked the states to pay special attention to the implementation of the OSMS, also asking them to send their district plans by April end so that all plans could be approved by mid May.